The way our house is set up, the front door is the one we all use to leave and enter the house, so we are totally missing a side door or a “mud room” type of dumping ground for jackets, shoes, bags, etc. Our coat closet is a sad, tiny thing that pretty much just serves as a place to stash our off-season outerwear. We did manage to set up these inelegant but very functional tip-out shoe cabinets to at least keep the footwear situation mostly under control:

But bags and sweatshirts and such tend to end up in one of three locations: the fireplace hearth, the back of the couch, or the recliner chair. And invariably a cat will decide to lie on top of them, because that’s what cats do. 🙂

Because of how we’ve configured the living room and because the front door is right up against the corner, there isn’t really a good place to stick a console table or a storage bench that wouldn’t be completely in the way. So I finally settled on a row of coat hooks as the best organizing solution. I didn’t want to just stick them in the middle of the wall all alone, so I decided to try some sort of paneling to make them look more intentional instead of just being an afterthought. The space is a little less than 8 feet wide, so we bought a single 4’x8′ panel of beadboard and cut it in half so the lines would be vertical. Here’s Dave trimming down the edges a smidge using his handy new circ saw guide:

We also bought a single 8′ 1×4 board to serve as a “chair rail”. Dave routed a notch along one side so it would overlap the beadboard a little bit. (I didn’t catch a picture, but I imagine it would have looked similar to the one above.)

And then we nailed everything in! Sooo easy.

Well there were a few other steps like cutting a hole for the electrical outlet and caulking and painting, but honestly, this was such a simple project. I was a bit nervous that the seam between the two panels would be super obvious, You can see it running down the middle in the picture below, after caulking and priming but before putting the real paint on:

But by the final coat of paint the seam had completely disappeared. Here it is looking all spiffy. I went ahead and freshened up the front door with a new coat of paint too:

We decided we had enough space for eight hooks, and I decided I preferred the smaller “robe hooks” rather than the more traditional coat hooks. It’s a little more difficult to hang bags with thick straps on the smaller hooks, but I don’t feel like I’m going to impale myself on one…

And the hanging stuff doesn’t really get in the way of the path to the door, so it’s working quite well.

The view from the rest of the room isn’t quite as swanky now that there’s lots of random stuff hanging from the hooks, but I’ll take function over photo-worthiness. 🙂

Now we just need to move that hanging four-paneled mirror thing, it looks really weird being off center above the beadboard.